I wrote the title of this episode with full irony, but there really is a lot to admire about this guy. Not long ago, we would label Gou a classic success story. It is a luxury we now enjoy that we can better calculate the cost of one man’s success against the lives of others. That’s a good thing.

On the last page of the profile, we learn that Gou is diving deeper into China, to chase cheaper labor. It felt a little creepy to me at first, but there’s no reason for that to feel any different than anything else he’s done. In the end, it’s all a little unsettling.

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2 thoughts on “An Admirable Man”

Ford fired people who drank too much, and his support of prohibition indicates that “too much” was probably lower than you or I would like. So I’d guess that if he employed 900,000 people, there would be more than 11 suicides.

More seriously, according to Wikipedia and NIMH, the general rate in the United States is 11 and change per 100,000 per year, and Wikipedia puts China’s rate at 22 and change per 100,000 per year. So FoxConn appears well below the average. You’d probably have to do a more stratified analysis to be sure, though.